Digital World Meet the Real World - An Audience and Media Model
This is a simple model for looking at the meta choice relationships for a brand/person/program between its audiences and communities, response goals (emotional and intellectual), and engagement/distribution platforms.
Center Circle: This is the initial source or core entity which can be a person, brand, network, program, movement, etc.
Second Ring: With your core subject area at heart, this is about the identification of the high level breakdown of the audiences/communities that are important for you to engage with. This may include both individuals or organizations that already know of you or do not know of you, who are your advocates, detractors or are passive bystanders. If what is at the center is completely new, then it is about finding communities "talking about" relevant related subject areas.
This is the time for some "digital anthropology" of listening and learning before engaging appropriately. It's also time for finding the influencers, ambassadors and action-oriented conversation leaders and media creators through observation, as well as through a variety of social media influencer tools. A careful parsing of popular vs influential individuals is in order, segmented by content area.
Third Ring: What is the engagement result for which you are striving - both emotional and intellectual? What's the tone in which you are going to deliver and then what's your expectation back from the audience/community? And are you "prepared" for the unexpected? Data may be important, but it is passion that drives things forward.
Fourth Ring: This is where one needs to become wary of the obsession with the newest "shiny geeky object," particularly in digital space. There are literally dozens of distribution/engagement categories with hundreds of companies and technologies populating them. It's easy to get swept up in the "Twitter-verse," and forget that what's right for one is not for another. That said, a healthy dose of clearly defined experimentation is always important.
It is critical to link thinking about the fourth ring "distribution/engagement categories" to a traditional and technology-based understanding of second ring "audience/community." In "Groundswell," Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff coined the term “Technographics” - as similar to demographics and psychographics, but with a focus on developing profiles based on technology behaviors. Before a mixture of real world and digital world distribution/engagement models can be selected, it is critical to know the distribution model of the people with whom you are hoping to engage. Are they at one end of the spectrum as creators who are active bloggers or video creators/uploaders; somewhere in the middle where the might comment or rate on content created by others; or are they passive readers or viewers who don’t leave a “visible” footprint. One can see how critical this understanding is if you look at an example of launching a consumer generated media campaign to an audience with a technology profile that is dominated by raters/commenters. Not much is going to happen in that case as the activity does not translate to the audience, even if the subject area is relevant.
Fifth Ring: There is incredible power to be found at the intersection of the Digital (Web) and Real (Live) Worlds. Life is lived in both places. No matter how much the Web has evolved, you can't (yet) touch objects as you can in the real world to create powerful sensory physical experiences and memories. And nothing in the real world can reach the potential of the Internet for distribution and democratized exchange that pierces geographic, economic and social borders. Think of the power where one can feed the other in relationship with appropriate audiences/communities.